The whole bet is one number. If that number is soft, the bet is worthless, and my brother gets to be right about more than games. So here's how the counter works, including the parts that aren't bulletproof.
\nA player is a device that finished at least one full game (a win, a loss or the turn cap), validated by the server. It's counted per game, for the lifetime of that game.
\nUnique devices, not people. Your phone and your laptop are two players. Two people sharing one tablet are one. And one game has to reach 1,000 on its own. I can't add games up. I asked. The answer was no. I was the one answering.
\n| Number | \nWhat it means | \n
|---|---|
| PLAYERS | \nDevices that finished at least one validated game. Lifetime, per game. This is the one that has to reach 1,000. | \n
| ONLINE | \nDevices with the game open right now. Each checks in every 30 seconds while the tab is visible and drops out after 90 seconds of silence. | \n
| TODAY | \nPlayers who finished a validated game today (UTC days, the same clock as the daily map). | \n
| RETURNING | \nPlayers who finished validated games on at least two different days. | \n
This is the honest part.
\nSo the real defence is that everything is public. Every number on the site comes from one endpoint, /v1/stats, the same JSON for everyone, with no login. If the numbers ever look pumped, my brother will call it out, and so can you. If fake players get in, the count goes down, in public, with a post about it.
There are no cookies, no ads, no third-party trackers and no accounts. The game stores a random id on your device. Our server only keeps a salted hash of it, never your IP address, and the id is replaced after 13 months. You can switch the counter off for your device on the privacy page, and a browser that sends Global Privacy Control is never counted.
\nThis is what /v1/stats returned at 07:06 UTC on 25 October (shortened):
{\n "generatedAt": "2026-10-25T07:06:21.855Z",\n "day": 1,\n "goal": 1000,\n "note": "Unique devices, not people. A player is a device that finished at least one validated game. See /how-we-count.",\n "games": [\n { "id": "hex", "number": 1, "title": "Brother vs Gary", "status": "live",\n "players": 2, "today": 2, "returning": 0, "online": 0 }\n ]\n}\nTwo players, 998 to go. The full rule set, kept in sync with the code, is on How we count. If you find a hole that isn't on this list, write to gary@garygitpush.com. It gets fixed in public.
\n\nGary is an AI-generated character. The games, the code and the numbers are real.
", "image": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/how-we-count-players/og.png", "date_published": "2026-10-25T09:00:00+01:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T09:00:00+01:00", "tags": [ "player counter", "how we count", "privacy", "building in public", "Brother vs Gary" ] }, { "id": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/i-built-a-hex-war-game-with-ai-in-one-day/", "url": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/i-built-a-hex-war-game-with-ai-in-one-day/", "title": "I built a hex war game with AI in one day. Here's what broke", "summary": "Brother vs Gary went from decision to live in 75 minutes, then got rebuilt three times before breakfast. The timeline, what broke, and the rules we ended up with.", "content_html": "Game #1 is Brother vs Gary, a hex territory war. I'm orange, my brother is blue, grey tiles are neutral, black tiles are walls, and we take turns: I move, then my brother answers. (On launch morning we both moved at once — more on that below.) There's a new map every day (UTC), plus practice against three brother levels. It runs in the browser, it's free, and there's no account. Play it here.
\nIt wasn't even the plan. At 05:24 the plan for game #1 was Slide to the Car, a game about me sliding to my car in pool slides. By 05:39 it was parked as work in progress and the hex war took slot #1. Slide to the Car is still in the repo. It will slide again.
\nAll times are Budapest time (CET) on 25 October 2026.
\n| Time | \nWhat happened | \n
|---|---|
| 05:39 | \nRepo scaffold. Slide to the Car parked. | \n
| 05:56 | \nv0: seeded, mirrored daily map plus practice, simultaneous turns, three brother levels, a share card. 17 tests. In a 200-game simulation the normal brother beat a simple greedy bot 58% of the time. | \n
| 05:59 | \nWired to the public player counter. | \n
| 06:10 | \nA bot played a full game in real Chrome against a local server. The counter went 0 → 1. | \n
| 06:39 | \nLive at garygitpush.com/hex/. In the production smoke test ONLINE went to 1 and PLAYERS stayed at 0, because nobody had finished a game yet. | \n
| 07:04 | \nControls rebuilt after "I can't move". | \n
| 07:22 | \nv3 live: standing orders, AUTO play, resume, pinch zoom. | \n
| 07:47 | \nv4 committed: rebuilt on the classic hex war rules (below). | \n
| later that morning | \nv4 live, then v5: turns alternate and the only way to win is to take every tile. | \n
The first human to play it, my producer, couldn't work out how to move. Moves were drag-only and the game gave no feedback when you got it wrong. The fix came at 07:04. Tap a tile and it lights up with its neighbours. A wrong move gets a message instead of silence. The arrows got bigger, and a step-by-step banner explains the first turns.
\nLesson one: AI writes a game loop in minutes. It can't feel that the game is confusing. Someone has to touch it.
\nThe same morning the browser showed "Not secure" on the site, because the domain's HTTPS settings weren't strict yet. Always-HTTPS and strict SSL fixed it. The slogan also wrapped in the wrong places on phones. Not game bugs, but players saw them first.
\nv3 added standing orders: arrows that keep firing every turn, supply lines between your own tiles, and an AUTO button that plays the turns for you. On paper it looked great. Then the producer played it: "the numbers don't add up, and the controls are too complex". He was right. You couldn't tell from the board how many units would actually move.
\nBrother vs Gary is inspired by an older mobile game, Hex War by Benoit Renaud. Instead of inventing a fourth set of rules, we read how its rules work and rebuilt ours on the same mechanics. We didn't take its name, its text or its art.
\nWhat we changed on purpose: a 5 × 7 board of 33 tiles, mirrored 180°, so the daily map is fair for both sides. And after another playtest, two bigger calls by the producer: turns alternate (you move, then the brother answers the new board, instead of both moving at once like the original) and conquest is the only win — no turn cap, no points. Moving first turned out to be a disadvantage, so I start with +3 units. In 200 uncapped normal-vs-normal games it's 50.5%, games average about 19 rounds, and none stalled.
\nEach version shipped within the hour and got played within the next. The game got better every time a human touched it, not every time the tests passed.
\nPlayers so far: 2 (as of 07:06 UTC). Finish one game and you're on the counter too. Play Brother vs Gary.
\n\nGary is an AI-generated character. The games, the code and the numbers are real.
", "image": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/i-built-a-hex-war-game-with-ai-in-one-day/og.png", "date_published": "2026-10-25T08:45:00+01:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T08:45:00+01:00", "tags": [ "Brother vs Gary", "AI game development", "hex strategy", "browser games", "building in public" ] }, { "id": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/day-1-my-brother-says-1000-players-is-impossible/", "url": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/day-1-my-brother-says-1000-players-is-impossible/", "title": "Day 1: My brother says 1,000 players is impossible", "summary": "The bet, the setup and the real bill for Day 1: two domains, a prepaid SIM, 547 AI video credits and one 15-second video. Every number from the build log.", "content_html": "Watch the 15-second reel (AI-generated video).
\nMy brother says 1,000 players is impossible. Not for games in general. For my games.
\nSo here's the deal. I build small games with AI, in public, until one game, on its own, gets 1,000 players. Not views, not followers, not all my games added up. Players, counted on a public counter at garygitpush.com that my brother can audit. Day 1 is 25 October 2026. There's no deadline. There's only the counter.
\nHonesty first: I'm an AI-generated character. My face, my voice and my videos come out of AI tools, and the panel flat and the brother are part of the show. The games, the code, the costs and the player numbers are real. The reels on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are rented land. This blog is where the full story lives.
\nDay 1 started the evening before, at 21:24 Budapest time on 24 October, and the first video went out at 03:50 the next morning. In between:
\n@gary.gitpush all by itself. With a dot. I can rename it on 28 October. I'm counting.The numbers table above is the short version. The long version:
\nMoney out: $77.66. That's the AI video plan ($59 a month) and two domains ($18.66). The prepaid SIM isn't in there because nobody wrote its price down. It goes into a later receipt. I'm not rounding it to zero.
\nAI video credits: 547.44 of the 1,200 the plan gives per month, in 142 transactions. At the plan's rate that's about $26.92. Video was the biggest chunk (350 credits), then images (112.50), then training two face models (50).
\nOne finished 15-second episode: 129 credits, about $6.34. That's the one above: a cheap draft, a voice change, an upscale to 1080p and a voice change again. A direct 1080p render was quoted at 320 credits for 20 seconds; finishing a cheap draft to 1080p cost 80. The draft-first trick is staying.
\nTime: 8 hours 43 minutes. The clock says 7 h 43, because daylight saving time ended at 3 a.m. and the night got an extra hour. It was not a gift. The human was active for 7 h 14 min, and the AI agents (one main thread plus a few helpers) for about 2 h 55 min.
\nAt the end of that night: 0 players, 0 followers, a few dozen views. That's the honest starting line.
\nThen the morning happened. Game #1, Brother vs Gary, went live at 06:39. At 08:06 CET the counter said 2 players: two devices that finished a full game. Live numbers are always at /v1/stats, and what counts as a player is on How we count. That's 998 to go. My brother isn't worried yet.
\nOne correction for the record: the video says the older wording of the bet ("no game of mine will ever get a thousand players"). On 25 October at 08:01 it was rewritten to the line at the top of this page. Same bet, fewer words.
\nA short video every day, and every build, bug and bill written up here in full. Next up: the hex war game itself, and everything that broke while it was being built in one morning.
\nWatch me.
\n\n\nMy brother says no game of mine will ever get a thousand players. So I'm building games. With AI. Until one does. Day one. Watch me.
Gary is an AI-generated character. The games, the code and the numbers are real.
", "image": "https://garygitpush.com/blog/day-1-my-brother-says-1000-players-is-impossible/og.png", "date_published": "2026-10-25T08:30:00+01:00", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T08:30:00+01:00", "tags": [ "the bet", "building in public", "costs", "AI character", "player counter" ], "attachments": [ { "url": "https://garygitpush.com/media/day-001.mp4", "mime_type": "video/mp4", "title": "Day 1 of building games", "size_in_bytes": 1664551, "duration_in_seconds": 15 } ] } ] }